Engineer here, but my technical expertise is about as far away from computing and technology as you can get and still be an engineer.

I was a kid in the 90s and the first album I bought was Metallica’s black album. I spent over $18 in like 1999 so with inflation that’s like $300 or something now. Then the drummer of what was then my favorite band says hey, if you’re downloading our music on Napster, then we don’t want you as a fan. That hit teenage me pretty hard and basically radicalized me to find “alternative methods” for every piece of digital media I could, if that’s how the people I looked up to were going to treat me for not having as much money as them. Everything I host now started at that inflection point, from picking up Linux as a hobby to learning about networking and security. Turned out to be a pretty good path to follow though seeing how Microsoft, Netflix, Spotify et. al. turned out in the end.

I still download and share all of Metallica’s discography out of spite, but haven’t listened to them since.

The military. Being on a ship with no wifi for months on end sort of makes you invest in entertainment that can go off grid. It started with a 3TB hard drive and what amounts to a NAS for hooking up to a computer screen or TV. I then moved to using Plex for streaming and the interface. Eventually I moved to Jellyfin.

At this point I just have a server in my living room with 10TB’s worth of drives and the ability to share just about anything locally or wirelessly when I’m outside my house.

My job is technical but not… IT, cyber security, or development related. I’ve always been interested in computers though and have built several at this point.

I started with Raspberry Pi and Arduino for a scientific project that later became a published paper. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0278752

Now I have a couple Pis and ESP32s around the house doing all sorts of jobs, and am managing Docker-hosted shiny dashboards at work

Surgeon.

Seeing tech ceo’s at the trump inauguration got me sick in the stomach. I unsubscribed from everything out of spite and nausea and learned to selfhost over the course of what is almost a year now. At first it took up all my spare time and made my wife crazy. Now it’s been several weeks since i last had to sudo anything.

It also opened my eyes to how stupid everything IT related in my country is. My municipality for example bought for what has now become a billion fucking euros a digital health record system from Epic. It’s the shittiest piece of software ive ever used, fully closed source and there’s ongoing customization costs trying to get it to work. We’re also a 100% onboard with office360 (copilot and all).

The diversity represented here is interesting to me. Surgeon, teachers, musicians, mechanics, etc. Fascinating.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread #87 for this comm, first seen 12th Feb 2026, 16:01] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I’m an entrepreneur, jack of all trades good at none. My relationship with technology started at a very young age thumbing through the pages of Pop Sci & Pop Mechanics magazines. As a kid, I would drag my wagon to electronic repair shops (back when people actually had their electronics fixed) and ask if there was any ‘junk’ they wanted to get rid of. I’d load up my wagon and back to the house I’d go to explore all my treasures. Some of it I actually could fix and I was the only kid I knew with stereos, turntables, small b&w TVs, radios, 8-track & cassette players. The excess, I would sell to friends.

I built my first 5 watt HAM radio set from a kit from the N.R.I which promised me that if I completed the course, I would be guaranteed of a successful career in electronics. LOL Later on, a friend of mine at the time and I built our own low power FM transmitter and would put on shows after school for the kids in the neighborhood. We would take call ins for requests…until that drove my parents(?) mad because of the constant phone ringing.

My first computer was an Altair, then a Timex/Sinclair, and I’ve had just about one of each since then.

Fast forward to the age of the internet, and my first real ‘self hosting’ gig was running a fully licensed, internet radio station in the pre-napster era. Well, Napster came out I think in 1999-ish and that’s about the time I fired up the internet radio station. It was selfhosted and streamed to Shoutcast CDN servers paid for by an outfit I worked with called the IM Radio Networks. Everything was automated. We could take requests from a webpage of popular choices, that got funneled to the server, and in a couple songs, you got to hear your request. We featured Indie bands we solicited from MP3.com, but also carried commercial bands too. And then the RIAA took a giant shit on internet radio. A large group of us went to Washington to plead our case before a committee headed up by Senator Leahy.

From there, I’ve been selfhosting something or another but it didn’t start to really gel into something really serious until Docker came around. That changed the game. That takes up to present day 2026. Still selfhosting, still intrigued by technology, still that wide eyed kid trying to learn all he can stuff into his limited brain.

By diploma, I am a musician. By job, i am a simple electronics production worker.

I got into self-hosting after buying a TV and a car. I really didn’t want to connect TV to the internet, so I decided to use a N100 based miniPC. And I live in a place where car thefts are very common, so I been searching a tool to self-host GPS tracker so I don’t have to pay monthly fee to some Chinese company to know where my car is. That is how I got into self-hosting Traccar. And then Pandora’s box was open.

I’ve always had a thing for tech. I used to make my own custom MySpace profiles, and pet pages on NeoPets, apply custom cursors to my PC, handled stuff when thr computer got viruses; all the stuff you’d expect of a 10 year old with an unrestricted internet access, and a love for technology. I did go to college for networking, but didn’t finish, and ended up in an unrelated field (won’t name here to avoid doxing myself, but I’m not even allowed to troubleshoot any tech to emphasize how unrelated this is).

I did kinda… Completely drop off for a while, but the thing that got me back was my most recent anti-Microsoft kick. Completely dropped Win10 (I’d usually had a windows and Linux machine at all times), dropped Google as my email, started using omg.lol for a lot of things, etc. Then I went half-in on a computer to use as a DNS-wide adblocker, and noticed that I could do… A lot more with it, and I like to tinker, so why not do a lot more with it? 2 years later, and it’s still the best $100 I’ve ever spent tbh.

My first interest was in running Unix for uucp Usenet, early 1980s. Never happened since I was poor, so it took DSL availability some 20+ years ago to run a Debian server at home. Around 1997 I ran my own Linux box on a university network, which ran a web server.

I’m an accountant and tax professional but have always been into computers. I had a social media account breached although it was no issue as hadn’t used it did years. I used a terrible password as thought it did not matter but made me realise I needed to be better generally so started using a password manager.

Then Netflix stopped account sharing. I had just got a 4k TV and only their top level with 4 screens supported it so was pissed off. The fragmentation across services had started so was getting annoyed anyway. This led me to the arr’s.

I decided I could no longer trust Microsoft and hated their pricing structure so was interested in Nextcloud. By then I found the self hosted community (on reddit), bought a desktop PC and after getting the hang of it plus many mistakes I loved my services so will never look back.

Joined the migration to Lemmy. Am based in the UK and joined the anti-US feelings so am setting up more storage, better redundancy and more services for my family. A few family members are interested in helping so can share backups.

Liking computers in general and switching to Linux at 15 out of desperation.

After that all it took was getting an shitbox pc as a hand me down to make me go “Linux is also used on servers right? Shouldn’t be too difficult to setup something.” And that’s how I got the bug.

The increasing clarity that “big cloud” is one of the most existentially dangerous threats in the long term. The idea of not truly owning my own data, particularly in an era where truth itself is becoming more and more malleable, became intolerable.

Secondarily, the desire to get off the subscription hamster wheel and own all my own media.

R/buyfromeurope brought me here. Already got a NAS and discovered that it can run docker.

The question is not why to start, but when do you stop, lol

I’m working in pharmaceutical production industry and I have started selfhosting few months ago.

I wanted to replace google photos with immich, cause my photo collection approached 200gb and I didn’t want to upgrade to 2tb version. My gf also had same problem

Bought second hand mini pc for 100€ to test to see how it goes and if I had decided to go back, i would have sold it.

Initially I was following FUTO guide, but quickly noticed it was too extensive and complex for my setup. I managed to set up immich with reverse proxy, did few mistakes here and there, but when it finally worked, I got hooked. I now have:

• local backups to external drive (borg-web-ui docker)
• ntfy. To send noticiation to my phone after backup had finished
• diun. To notify when docker update is available
• dockgee. docker management
• tailscale. Remote access

All of it comes gradually, I’m tinkering with home assistant vm now.